[3] Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate.

[citation needed] Finally, Huxley was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake, about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia.

[23] However, Huxley effectively resigned from the navy by refusing to return to active service, and in July 1854 he became professor of natural history at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year.

[24] The thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance the place of science in British life.

)[34] Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on the traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment – he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, and Arthur Balfour, and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil.

[13] The first half of Huxley's career as a palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic.

[citation needed] The lobe-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lungfish) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur.

[44][45] An Easterner, Marsh was America's first professor of palaeontology, but also one who had come west into hostile Indian territory in search of fossils, hunted buffalo, and met Red Cloud (in 1874).

[46](pp 52, 141–160) Funded by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis, and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but the horse fossils were really special.

[citation needed] And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene: The ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum).

Huxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859,[54] and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860.

Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of the review in the Quarterly: Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.

"If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...[58][59]Since his death, Huxley has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog", taken to refer to his pluck and courage in debate, and to his perceived role in protecting the older man.

Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of Vestiges, who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance.

Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate—the exact wording is not certain—was widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.

A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his theory that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo.

Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public dissection to show that the same structures (the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and hippocampus minor) were indeed present in apes.

[citation needed] Owen conceded that there was something that could be called a hippocampus minor in the apes, but stated that it was much less developed and that such a presence did not detract from the overall distinction of simple brain size.

[83] Huxley also started to dabble in physical anthropology, and classified the human races into nine categories, along with placing them under four general categorisations as Australoid, Negroid, Xanthochroic and Mongoloid.

The members were: Huxley, John Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock (banker, biologist and neighbour of Darwin), Herbert Spencer (social philosopher and sub-editor of the Economist), William Spottiswoode (mathematician and the Queen's Printer), Thomas Hirst (Professor of Physics at University College London), Edward Frankland (the new Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) and George Busk, zoologist and palaeontologist (formerly surgeon for HMS Dreadnought).

[29] In the main, the method was based on the use of carefully chosen types, and depended on the dissection of anatomy, supplemented by microscopy, museum specimens and some elementary physiology at the hands of Foster.

It is an interesting fact that the methods of the field naturalists who led the way in developing the theory of evolution (Darwin, Wallace, Fritz Müller, Henry Bates) were scarcely represented at all in Huxley's program.

[109] Since Darwin, Wallace and Bates did not hold teaching posts at any stage of their adult careers (and Műller never returned from Brazil) the imbalance in Huxley's program went uncorrected.

Ernst Mayr said "It can hardly be doubted that [biology] has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems"[118]—and Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for this trend in Britain.

[123] In 1893, during preparation for the second Romanes Lecture, Huxley expressed his disappointment at the shortcomings of 'liberal' theology, describing its doctrines as 'popular illusions', and the teachings they replaced 'faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth'.

Afterwards, he sank into a "deep lethargy" and, though Huxley ascribed this to dissection poisoning, Bibby[152] and others may be right to suspect that emotional shock precipitated the depression.

It was the debate about man's place in nature that roused such widespread comment: cartoons are so numerous as to be almost impossible to count; Darwin's head on a monkey's body is one of the visual clichés of the age.

And Huxley hangs out in Jermyn Street.Huxley's low set included Hooker "in the green and vegetable line" and "Charlie Darwin, the pigeon-fancier"; Owen's "crib in Bloomsbury" was the British Museum, of which Natural History was but one department.

The group of 21 academics had been launched in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to address Imperial's "links to the British Empire" and build a "fully inclusive organisation".

[164] A critical response by Nick Matzke said that Huxley was a public, longstanding abolitionist who wrote "the most complete demonstration of the specific diversity of the types of mankind will nowise constrain science to spread her ægis over their [slaveholders'] atrocities" and "the North is justified in any expenditure of blood or of money, which shall eradicate a system hopelessly inconsistent with the moral elevation, the political freedom, or the economical progress of the American people";[165] a major opponent of the racist position of polygenism, as well as the position that some human races were transitional (in 1867 Huxley said "there was no shade of justification for the assertion that any existing modification of mankind now known was to be considered as an intermediate form between man and the animals next below him in the scale of the fauna of the world"); a vehement opponent of the scientific racist James Hunt; and a political radical who believed in granting equal rights and the vote to both Black people and women.